The Wing Commander Saga team wishes all of you a merry Christmas. We would like to thank all of you for your supports throughout the year, and we know that we can never express our appreciation enough. We will continue to dedicate ourselves to bringing you an exciting and interactive space opera, and we hope that you will provide us with continuous supports in the coming year! Merry Christmas!!!

This has been a very productive year for the Wing Commander community! Many great fan projects have been produced some high quality releases this year. We are excited that the Wing Commander community has so much creative energy. The CIC is holding its annual awards ceremony for fan projects and websites. Drop by the CIC and see what has been released this year. There are a lot of great projects to choose from, so make sure to cast your vote for the one you think deserves the award for project of the year and website of the year.

As we get closer to the release of Wing Commander Saga, we are continuing our policy of releasing new information about our upcoming game every few weeks to continue to keep you up to date on the project's progress. Today we would like to share some new screenshots, that demonstrate the progress we've made with the Kilrathi textures since the release of the Prologue. You will note our visual style for these textures has evolved. You'll be seeing more of our new art style as we continue pushing out media. These shots are just an appetizer.

One thing many people may not know about textures is that it is very easy to overcomplicate them. Oftentimes, the many sources we use as inspiration lead to an avalanche of good ideas, so we start piling one atop another and eventually, instead of a good, cool texture, we end up with an over-designed, bloated mess. As one graphic designer put it, you should keep adding to the design until you realize that you have ruined it, and then go back and do it again, but leave out the last step that killed the design. In our design process we went down the path of trying to cram too many good ideas in, but thankfully we realized the error of our ways and pulled back. We think we have pulled back in a way that we're allowing ourselves some growing room.

For this week's update, we would like to focus on one of the lesser-known featuress of Wing Commander Saga, namely the fiction viewer. We haven't said a lot about it in the past, which is unfortunate because it is actually a rather large part of the Wing Commander Saga experience.

One of thing that's always difficult for game designers is to figure out how to convey the story yet not interfere with the game play. This is difficult because not all gamers are the same. You might classify gamers into two camps: first, you have the gamers that LOVE story and want to know everything about every character, location, and event, and then you have the gamers that just want to blast Kilrathi out of the sky. We didn't want either of these camps to be dissapointed. So, we came up with a system that we believe lets us have the best of both worlds.

During missions the player will encounter in-game dialogue and scripted cutscenes which contain aspects of the story that are "mission critical," which means that without them the story just doesn't hold together and the characters are meaningless. The story told through the fiction viewer, though, is completely optional, but adds a tremendous amount of depth. It covers action that occurs in between missions, fleshes out characters' relationships and motivations, deals with human dilemmas, joys, triumphs, and downfalls, and provides background information, all while expanding the overall narrative. In this way, the fiction viewer allows players that are interested in the deeper aspects of the story to dig in a little further. However, it doesn't force this extra content on players who just want to jump back in the cockpit for the next mission.

So, if you are content just focusing on dodging missiles and icing Kilrathi, nothing will get in your way, and you'll still be able to enjoy the Wing Commander Saga story. If you would like to dig deeper into our representation of life in the Wing Commander universe, give the fiction viewer a try!

Since Wing Commander Saga takes place during the events of Wing Commander 3 and will take the player through some of the most pivotal events of the Terran Kilrathi War, you can bet there is a chance you might run into a few familiar faces along the way. That's where our poll this week comes in.

Greetings to all. We would like to give you some great news about the development of Wing Commander Saga.

The Wing Commander Saga main campaign will consist of 7 episodes and will have a grand total of 50 missions. We are happy to announce that as of a few days ago, all of the missions for the first 6 episodes are now "gameplay complete".

What that means is each of those missions is now completely playable. However, there is a difference between "gameplay complete" and "done". "Gameplay complete" means all the enemies, objectives, secondary goals, and so forth are in place and functional, so that you could play through the mission and the whole thing would work. To get to "done", there is some additional art that needs to be added, as well as the ever present process of polishing and refining balance.

However, we are very excited to reach the "gameplay complete" milestone on the vast majority of the missions. The game is almost completely playable, and now it is time to add the real detail work.

This week, we would like to display some more of our revisioned fighter textures. As we mentioned with our Confederation fighters, we believe our new textures capture the general emotional feel of this period of the war: gritty and battleworn. Check out the screenshots for updated pirate ship textures with a new look.

Every large project has to face the problem of distribution and Wing Commander Saga is no different. Recently our list of download mirrors had to be shortened and we need your help to improve its level of quality again. We are looking for mirrors all over the world, specifically for the Macintosh version. If you run a mirror and would like to have it listed on our site, please send us a note. We would also like to take this opportunity to thank those who are already providing Wing Commander Saga with mirrors. Thank you!

It's an exciting time for our fans in Germany and Austria as Mind Crusher Studios have completed voiceover work for the German version of Wing Commander Saga. We think it came out fantasticly! We were extremely lucky to work with such an incredible and talented group. These guys and gals just nailed it. I could continue gushing, but instead I have simply uploaded a completely translated intro video as a showcase. Get it here and don't forget to leave feedback via the commentary function.

Our old poll asked which Kilrathi ace in WC III is your favorite. Thrakhath won our tally, Stalker and Fireclaw came in second and third.

The new poll asks which Kilrathi fighter you would like to fly. There are a lot of possibilities: Bloodfang, Darket, Dralthi MK4, Khahaf, Paktahn, Sorthak, Strakha, Vaktoth. Vote now and then hit the 'Write comment' link to tell the world how you decided.